It's My Party: Adventurers Don't Operate in a Vacuum

Bernard grabbed another glass from the bar, dipped his rag into a bucket of beer-colored water, and polished the glass to no obvious effect.  He looked out at his patrons.  It was the usual lot: crusty old farmers, local ruffians, gangly stable boys...  He saw a couple of farmers drain their glasses and push them away.  Bernard was about to draw it to the attention of one of his barmaids when the door burst open.  Sunlight briefly streamed into the bar before being blocked out by the newcomers.  First came an ugly brute of a half-orc with a glowing greatsword strapped to his back, followed shortly by a hooded figure with a black cloak and brandishing a wicked staff topped with a gruesomely realistic human skull.  Next through the door was an anthropomorphic raven in spiked red armour with a mandolin in one hand and a flaming katana in the other.  Last but not least was a black-skinned elf with piercing red eyes, dressed only in woven ivy and riding a monstrous tiger.  

"The conquering heroes return!" Bernard called out from the bar.  "What'll it be, fellas?  The usual?"

~~~~~

Adventuring parties are a strange thing.  Oftentimes, they are actually comprised of many strange things.  It's not much of a problem when you have a group of humans with the occasional elf, dwarf, or halfling.  But there are a huge variety of strange playable races available to your players, some of which are quite literally monsters - in a game where fighting monsters is not an uncommon occurrence.  Some would say it is a defining characteristic.

So if your party includes crow-men, fox people, frog-folk, horned hellspawn, winged monsters, talking monkeys, the bad guys from Lord of the Rings, or magical robots, you should probably give some thought to how they are going to be seen by the people they are trying to save.  This applies equally whether you are GMing a game or writing a fantasy story.

What are the main races of your campaign world?
Most campaign settings cannot realistically grant equal footing to all the myriad playable races.  There is just no room for multiple kingdoms dominated by snake-people, half-vampires, and talking trees, nor is there time to explain it all (heck, even a whole kingdom of half-elves would beg a lot of questions).  I would wager that the majority of campaign settings give the most attention to humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, and gnomes - the base races - and even then you get a lot of "This is a human kingdom, this is an elf kingdom, the dwarves live in the mountains, and I guess the gnomes and halflings hang out wherever."  (But that's a subject for a different post).  Most campaign settings are pretty human-centric, for the obvious reason that most D&D players are human.

Generally, if an adventuring party is composed entirely of players of the main races of your setting, they wouldn't attract much in the way of odd looks if they were to stroll through a town.  Also think about the way racial commonality might change from place to place.  For instance, when I am running a campaign in the Arabian Nights area of my setting, the four elemental races of ifrit, sylph, oread, and undine are not an uncommon sight (due to genie dalliances with the mortal inhabitants of the realms), while dwarves are quite rare (because it's hard to dig in sand).  Thus a barkeep there would not think twice if a red-eyed, fiery haired, copper-skinned ifrit walked in, but would do a double-take if a gruff, bearded dwarf did.

How common are the other races, and how do they fit in to the setting?
The first question you need to ask yourself for each of the other races is: do they even exist in this world?  Use this to determine, from the start, what races you will and won't allow your players to play.  And then, once you have decided which races are the main races (see above), find at least one role for all the other races that you are allowing.  That way, if a player wants to be one of those, he is not making his choice in a vacuum; he or she will have some thread to build a story off of.  It would limit the amount of meaningful social interaction that character could have with the world if he is the only member of his race that the party ever encounters, and no one ever remarks on it.

How accepting are the everyday people in your setting?
This is a question that applies to dwarves and elves just as much as it applies to tieflings and duergar.  Having a large number of races together in one place doesn't necessarily mean they will get along well.  In fact, humans will kill each other at the drop of a hat if they come from different tribes or religions.  Just ask Bosnia.  So give some thought to race relations in your world.  Do dwarves and elves hate each other in classic Tolkien fashion?  Are the other races distrustful of violent, expansionist humans?  Maybe gnomes and halflings hate each other, or orcs and centaurs are best friends.  In my campaign setting, humans distrust elves because elves were responsible for the destruction of one of humanity's earliest and greatest civilizations.

Even discounting vast racial prejudice, your adventuring party may be entering villages where the people have only heard of elves in stories, or are naturally distrustful of strangers.  There are a lot of angles to approach this from.

But the bottom line is player comfort.  If your players just want to play the game, don't introduce widespread prejudice against their characters.  If they are okay with the roleplaying challenge, go with it.  But always make sure your players know about the cultural connotations of their race before character creation.  Under no circumstances should the following happen:

"The barkeep slams the door on you and yells 'Git out, ye filthy halfling scumbags!'  Oh, you didn't know everyone hates halflings in this world?  Too bad you made an all-halfling party...  Roll initiative; the town guards are attacking you."

How common are adventuring parties in your campaign world?
This isn't just about race; adventuring parties tend to fall well outside of the social norm.  They represent an incredible concentration of power and wealth, and they transcend the boundaries of justice and social class.  Also, they kill stuff like all the time.  Here on the internet, adventurers are often described as murder-hobos because they move from town to town, murdering all their problems away, carrying all their possessions on their person, and wearing the same unwashed clothes.  You can see how some people might not be the happiest to see them coming into town.

People's reaction to adventurers will vary based on how common they are in the world.  If this is a high fantasy setting, adventurers might be no more out of place than mercenaries, though perhaps a little more flashy.

Not that there were never flamboyant mercenaries.

In a campaign setting like Eberron, where you can't take ten steps without tripping over a magic stone or another freaking dragon, a party of wizards and magical robots wouldn't get a second glance at the magical flying tavern.  But in a setting where magic is rare, or even feared, you might get run out of town for wearing too pointy of a hat.

I try to strike a balance between the two.  I like to think that there are plenty of adventuring parties out there in the world - enough to have a significant impact on the economy, and to drive a dungeon-exploration-based industry.  Magic is common enough that some shops sell a few magic items, but most wizards are too sensible to go gallivanting off on adventures, risking their frail bodies.  There are enough druids in the world that bringing a giant lion into an inn isn't unheard of, though I imagine most innkeepers won't be too happy about it (but who are they to argue with the person who controls a giant lion?).  In a society where stories are told of brave adventuring troupes vanquishing evil, perhaps a band of dwarves and elves and what-have-you would be welcome in a small human village that had never seen such a sight.

Anyways, the point is: think about your adventuring party and its impact on the campaign setting.  If you make the reactions of NPCs more realistic, the players will be drawn into your world all the easier.

-your half-halfling d20 despot


Edit: For another take on this subject (more or less), see WotC-DM Chris Perkins' blogpost here.